Thursday, November 21, 2013

Somewhere along the line, all the blogging voices, all the
faith failures and victories, the devotions and encouragements and bickering
and conference hoopla and book promotion and linky parties and giveaways and
friend requests and…well, all of it…started to clamor. And the Christian
blogging community, though not in any
way bad by nature, became in my head a record day at the New York Stock
Exchange, with beautiful, hard-working people all shouting over each other in a
crowded room, and my head hurt and my heart raced and I had to retreat, and I
don’t mean the kind with workshops and book signings. And if I haven’t read or
commented on your blog as often as you’d like me to, and if I haven’t seemed to
have an explanation for it, or if you’re one of the many that assumes I’m just “too
busy to be bothered”….that’s really, really not it.

For so many reasons, I’m tired. Not tired of bloggers or
tired of blogging, and not at all tired of writing, but I’m tired for a lot of
unrelated reasons, and also because going through the ringer with Jesus? It’s an
exhausting business already, even more so when you’re trying to extract a 600-
to 800-word something that makes any
kind of sense and has application to a general audience with a few nice
pictures thrown in. My spiritual journey and my writing journey both
simultaneously took a few complex and beautiful twists and turns, and while I’m
grateful to be in the midst of it, I can’t manage to put it all into any words
I can live with putting out into the world. Everything I’ve tried to write for the
big, wide space I’m navigating right now feels like half Fight Club and half The 700
Club, and it just doesn’t make for great content for the “Best Christian
Bloggers” checklists, I’m afraid.

There is great and terrible beauty, as the saying goes, in
this down and dirty open-hearted life. Not all of it transfers cleanly to the
page. Not all of it has spiritual application for the masses. I am, just now,
basking in the wild and intimate uniqueness of God and how He relates to us each
in ways that cannot be quantified, and sometimes speaks messages for us that
are not for sale, and that cannot even be given away, even with the purest
intentions. There are love letters, gifts and challenges in the world, I am
finding, that are embroidered boldly with only my own name (and some with only yours
too)—devoid of usefulness for anyone else, but priceless even so.

For a long time, I fought it and wrestled myself because
when writers who are also extreme introverts struggle in any real way in their
lives, they can’t really get through *anything* without working it out in words
on pages. And when you’re just trying to get through the days and you know you
ought to be doing “something for Jesus,” blogging as a ministry makes a lot of
sense. And when your calling to write is clear, and you aren’t writing about
Jesus for the masses, there can be a big fat gap in the idea of purpose and
giftedness and all the things we’re taught about what we’re supposed to do with
ourselves in this life.

There are those of us who don’t find dialogue with Jesus
easy or particularly natural but even we still get the chance sometimes to hear
the still, small voice amidst the blinding clatter. And of all the things I can’t
clearly make out in this season of faith, within the big silent echo I hear so
often in response to my exploration, one big thing comes through loud and
clear.

I am not a commodity.

And that’s kind of the final word on the matter for now. He
is not for sale, for profit, for show, or even for the people I want most to
love and give everything to. This supernatural and private and wild and
wonderful secret place of the soul is just between us for the moment, and
though I am divided into so many segments in this life, this little bit is, for
now, just ours alone. I will have more that are intended for this community in
the future, I hope.

I’m still in the thick of things. I’m still writing and
seeking out loud, and telling it like it is, and I have no intention of
disappearing. I just value honesty, and I don’t like to leave folks wondering
what in the world is going on with me. I am not losing my religion. I am not
leaving the fold or straying or backsliding or any of those things. I am just
navigating the depths of what my faith looks like from the inside out, and it
is time to be quiet and thoughtful about it until I know where He is taking me
in all of this. And so, this place will continue to be a tad bit unmanned until
further notice.

Thanks for loving me and walking near me and being my
friends. I’ll be around. Mad love.

Tuesday, July 30, 2013

I’ve tried a thousand times to bring words to this place over
the last few months, and inevitably I give up, dissatisfied with attempts at authoritative
writing in what is proving to be a wide and hazy place of quiet but intense spiritual
growth for me.

But here’s the thing.

I spent some time on the mountaintop, in solitude, last week.
I sought silence and the presence of God and had my fill of both in more
abundance than I ever knew was possible. I heard in the rustle of leaves and
footsteps of speckled fawn on wet grass an enormous, wild dream that is so
outside of myself, so contrary to anything I could conjure or even imagine,
that it bound me to the heart of God in absolute surrender.

It was life changing, and it’s hard to know how to return to
regular life after an experience like that—a closeness with God I would do anything
or go anywhere or give everything to sustain. I understand the oaths of monks
and saints now, how one’s entire life could possibly be full with only the infinite
fullness of God, to a devotion to Him that leaves little room for temporal
distraction.

What I don’t yet know, what I am only now learning with each
passing hour, is how to live a life infused, how to make spaghetti or answer
email when I am bursting wide with all I am learning how to see and hear and
experience.

I have more clarity than I’ve ever had in all my life, more
faith and footing in solid places, but it’s time for me to say three words out
loud, in surrender, from the heart of this state of growth and depth and transparency.

I. Don't. Know.

There are just so many things I don’t know, things I’m not
willing to pretend I do know because a denomination or pastor or theory or
tradition or text tells me it’s true. There is so much of God I don’t
understand—so much He has not made clear in this world. There is so much more
to Scripture than taking its life-infused words without the aid of context or
serious, open-hearted, prayer-infused contemplation.

I don’t know how to reconcile the angry, destructive God of the
Old Testament with the absolute consuming warmth and love I have experienced of
Him. I don’t know how to balance the stories of Scripture with the science that
claims to counter their truth. I don’t know the answer for every question under the
sun, and I’m aware, more than ever before, that I am not meant to, that we are not meant to.

Scripture does not tell us that He came to answer our
questions, that He came to make us puppets, or that He came to give us the
tools for effective evangelism. He did not come to make us healthy or smart or
strong or wise. He did not come to give us logical satisfaction of His ways.

He camethat we might have life and have it
abundantly. (John 10:10)

Abundant life is so much deeper than whether or not we read
the Bible in a year or how many church-approved best-sellers sit on our
bookshelves. Abundant life is not the absolute knowledge and understanding of
God; rather, it’s the abandonment of yourself into His abundance, forsaking everything
else with the potential to captivate your heart.

My study of spirituality and the sacred truth of Scripture is
for the purpose of drawing my heart nearer to His, not to memorize canned and
shallow apologetic responses to complex matters of life and faith. Nothing on
earth or in the heavens is as easy as it seems. No verse in the Word of Life
stands on its own or means a thing without the breath of holy wisdom within it.
So why, friends, are we so afraid of embracing His mystery?

I know just enough to know that I know God’s heart deeply
and intimately only because He knows mine, because He actually, actively dwells
there. Yet I do not know His mind or His purposes for everything under heaven
because I am not Him. Everything I
know about God confirms only one thing: I know Him and I need to know nothing
more under heaven but that which drives me further into seeking more of Him.
This includes a surrender to the deep unknowing, a sobering awareness of the
orchestrated Divine that is far too large to be condensed into either a single
mind or an entire galaxy.

The only thing big enough to contain the mystery of God is
the heart of the human spirit which has stopped seeking to solve an equation of
God in order to make way for all of Him—even, no, especially the parts of Him that challenge our finite minds.

Knowing Him means letting go of my attempts to shape the
universe to my understanding, to answer all my questions and linger instead in
the holy mystery that is bigger than me and bigger than humanity and bigger
than all the forces of nature together.

I have enough faith to tell you I don’t know, and to tell
God right to His face that I just don’t know. And I’m grateful for that.

I don’t know if I’m a mystic or a Lutheran or a Methodist or
a Baptist or if I will touch earthly dirt during the Tribulation or if all dogs
go to heaven or why God made mosquitoes. I don’t know if any particular thing is right
given the circumstances or if any particular wrong is wrong without any regard
to the heart of the person engaging in it. I don’t know what happens in the
hearts and souls of those who have not yet seen God as He really is and not
merely the biased and blurry portrait we paint of Him as a Church. And mostly,
I don’t know why we’re all so afraid of all we do not yet know about God, why
it is shameful not to know something which has not been revealed clearly to us
directly by Him.

I read earlier today that the word agnostic means “not
knowing.” And friends, even if you have the Bible memorized, even if you’ve
graduated seminary, even if you prayed a sinner’s prayer at the age of four…you
are…all of us are…not knowing. We are
all agnostic when it comes to the
Divine.

I am a Christian with all my heart and soul—more now than I’ve
ever been. I claim the life and teachings of Christ and the all-consuming power
of God in Father, Son, and Spirit. And I feel no shame in telling you that I am
agnostic with all my heart, too. I hold loosely to my earthly understanding of all
things eternal with the certainty that there is much I cannot yet know, things that man cannot teach me, with
the knowledge that I am not privy to the Secret Things of God.

I don’t know what will happen with this online space as I
consider all the directions it could go, as I consider even whether to altogether
let it go.

Right now, I just don’t
know.

To borrow the words of Ian Morgan Cron in Chasing Francis, when one of his characters is asked about the differences in beliefs between evangelicalism and Catholicism... "I'd rather be a reverent agnostic. [...] There are countless mysteries that I have to stand before reverently and humbly while saying, 'I don't know.'"

But my prayer, in this space of my life and all the others,
is this:

Let God alone be the source of all I know or claim to know
or need to know. Let my mind be clear and discerning of Truth, let my humanity
not reject anything the Lord would show or teach me, either temporally or
eternally. Let my not-knowing be an honest seeking after the heart of God, and
let me never allow any religious teaching, logical response, or crafted defense
corrupt my awareness of the scope of God’s hugeness and holiness. Let me never choose
the wisdom of humanity over the wonder of God. Let me never be satisfied with the
boxes of logic and reason which seek to contain the Great and Holy Lord into
matchboxes fit for modern human pockets, flints with which to strike religious
fires that keep our egos warm. Keep me not knowing the things which will always
keep me seeking the face of Him alone. Keep me captivated and consumed by the God I don't understand, and collectively consumed in unity with His whole Church, and all the people in need of His love, which is to say, every person on this planet.

And let me never be afraid of I don’t know, perhaps the only space where I am truly teachable,
where only in emptiness can I be made whole.

Monday, April 29, 2013

It’s our first spring here and the tree outside our bedroom
window started blooming this week. I’ve strained long for those shoots of green,
narrowing my vision to examine brown bark, longing for a breakthrough.

The last few springs have been dark ones for me, humid and
hot ones and icy cold ones too. They’ve been cast in the shadow of all the
wrong places, darkened in the depth and ache so familiar to those landscapes which
became spiritual battlegrounds, bloody and muddy, gray like the dented armor of
my walled-up heart in those years.

Endless were the midnight games of holy hide-and-seek and I
was running in place, peering for God inside heart holes and behind graffiti’d buildings.

Come out, come out, wherever you are.

But this spring is different.

This spring there are fat yellow flowers and white petals
that trickle from trees and stick to my hair, and there are tulips and strawberries
right in my very own front yard, damp with the paint of God’s fresh brushstroke.
This spring there are cloudy days too but the low wisps and gusts tickle
colorful branches, scattering light about us like a thousand tiny mirrors
tumbling from the sun.

This blistering battlefield threatened to evaporate me in
those years. I thought I might dissolve into nothing but a puddle of melted-down
armor from the weight of it and the intensity of its temperature. Straining
hard for grace or maybe deliverance, still searching frantic for my hide-and-seek
God, I stumbled hard into patches of white, suspended in tangles of sweet honeysuckle,
fragrant and tangy with the taste of grace.

Come out, come out,
wherever you are.

In the stumbling, I learned to see. To look through eyes
that linger long on a dusky pink sky, to twist a child’s hair between my
fingers and take in a breath like a whisper, to taste a taste of love Divine.

It is not midnight hide-and-seek after all but a secret scavenger
hunt, our moments and years on this earth. There are millions of tiny treasures
tucked away for you. Have you noticed?

Love notes, written straight to you out there tucked inside
acorn shells and flittering from tree branches, scrawled on the footprints of a
child. They are bound majestically in a single grain of pink sugar, splashed
across the foamy coastline, dancing in the filtered lace-light of sunrays through
spring leaves and reflect the creative brilliance of our Father.

Rise from the battlefield along with me and smell the honeysuckle, my friend. There is
so much to see.

Monday, April 22, 2013

I pack with anticipation. Dreams flood and fly and I reach
for them, frantic and flailing. He has a dream for me, I know, but trying to
capture it, narrow and clear, is trying to catch a river in a paper cup.

The conference sessions are circled and starred in pink
ballpoint. I can’t wait to internalize the holy truth, the power and beauty of
the words from the mouths of these women who look like Technicolor Jesus to me,
these powerhouses with humble hearts, beautiful speakers and writers, friends
and sisters that bring me hard to my knees.

I’ve come here to meet the Divine and it’s all right there
in my grasp, right in the retreat center meeting room where I’m sure I’ll meet
with Him, where I know He’ll whisper gently that one. next. step. toward His
big, beautiful dreams for me.

It’s cost a thousand or so dollars for me to get here, a
small price to taste what lies in store, a holy encounter for merely a song, a
diamond necklace in a nickel machine container, and I am breathless for it.

We are giddy. Anticipation does that and so does the wine
and the salted caramels, the high from our still-bleeding foot tattoos,
identical, the forever reminder for our each and every step: Act justly. Love mercy. Walk humbly. I
am wrapped in the arms of my sister and the sun will be up soon but time does
not exist here. This is not a hotel room in the middle of Nebraska but a sacred
space where tears fall easy from eyes which have been dry too long, where the
seemingly insignificant trivialities are consecrated gifts, revelations in
disguise.

Amy plucks my eyebrows and speaks with the mouth of Jesus
and inexplicably, the sky ignites with fireworks and orange-breasted spring
robins dance across the icy parking lot and there is somehow nothing strange
about it at all. This is a thin place,
nothing but a gauzy lace curtain through which we stare right into the eyes of
Abba Father, locked in the gaze of El Roi:
the God of Seeing.

Sleep is short and morning is hard. Bottles with prescription labels decorate
this space, bottles with white caps, impossible caps that taunt these swollen
knuckles and frozen fingertips, aid for broken bodies. In the sacred space
behind the veil there is no need for these bottles, but here in this broken
world these capsules are the currency that buys a few moments of flexibility
and function. Last night this was a thin place; today, it’s a thick one. Thick
with sickness and pain where the clock hands tick off the rhythm of this
temporal world: Eight, Nine, Ten a.m. has gone and now so has eleven, and
twelve. The hours pass past the pink ink on our conference schedules and we
lament a little because it wasn’t supposed to be this way. We were supposed to
be in conference sessions, dancing with the Divine, filling our hearts with His
dreams for our lives, jumping off mountaintops in tandem with our sisters, arms
locked, hearts beating wild with our one collective yes.

The heart wants what the flesh will not allow. Today there
are no fireworks, no dancing robins, no giddy laughter. Today there is vomit,
there is throbbing, there is frustration and disappointment and pills that
don't do their job. Today the veil is not a veil of lace. It is a brick wall
and it is a hard strain to see through it. He holds us still, there is no
doubt, but I cannot catch His gaze.

Practical attempts are all that can be done but let the
hours pass, let the darkness lift organically through the passing of time and
tiptoes through the dark. I fire up the car and veer it toward the conference
center, towards the speakers we long to hear, and drive right past. I have not
come for this just now. I have come for a cold coke and a chicken sandwich and
a prayer vigil held quiet in the driver’s seat of a rented Dodge Avenger.

I have come here, to Nebraska, to be spiritual. I have come
here to draw near to the heart of God and I cry out to Him. I ask Him to
intercede, to form my words and my prayers to the needs of my sister in the
moments that make her feel weak. I am a do-er and I pray for practical steps,
for action on her behalf while my own knuckles throb with the rhythm of
sickness. I have come here to be spiritual. I try and conjure beautiful
prayers, powerful prayers. I try and invoke a healing spirit because I believe
in His power, because I know she deserves it, because I still believe that we
will meet God here, today.

What does she need,
Father? Oh, Jesus, what can I do? How can I help her? How can my words, my
empty spirit uplift and nurture, encourage and love in action?

I think of the conference speakers, of the beautiful words,
the eloquence of holiness and the leaps I have yet to make to be so eloquent.

And all at once, the brick dissolves. Light spills and there
is lace once more. Holiness is not always eloquent. Holiness is messy and
holiness sometimes comes with a splitting headache and a runny nose.

What can I do, Jesus?

And there it is.

You can get her a chicken sandwich, Cara. You can stop
searching merely for moments of fireworks and lace and start standing in the
moments of imperfection and brokenness. You can stop praying and start driving.
You can buy a chicken sandwich and sometimes, that’s all.

It’s been a while since the elements held this much
significance for me. It’s been awhile since the taste of communion was more
than dry bread and sweet wine, and I have forgotten the taste of His body,
broken even for broken-up me, broken for my hurting but lovely sister sleeping
in the hotel bed upstairs, and I do this in remembrance of Him.

Today there is more than bread and wine. Today there is coke
and chicken sandwiches and a veil so thin it vaporizes into air. Today, I have
met with the Divine and He has dreamed of me. My time in Nebraska didn’t look
like I thought it would. I missed every one of the breakout sessions I’d so
looked forward to enjoying. I hugged necks swift with quick smiles and polite
words and too few stirred-heart conversations with the beautiful people
gathered in this Midwestern God-spot.

And yet, we found Him in Nebraska all the same. Tangible holiness,
sacred beauty in prescription bottles and breakfast menus, milk soap and nose
rings and airport bathrooms. Thin places, all of them…thin spaces thick with
grace and reverie.

I am grateful for the parts of the conference we were able
to attend, blessed beyond measure by the words and dreams of Deidra, Jennifer,
Emily, Dan, Shelly, Diana, Kelli, Holly and Holley, Sandra, the ViBella team,
Amy (of course), and all the beautiful women and men who dreamed big and
dreamed scared and slid hands across the table to one another this weekend. We
all whispered yes with trembling
voices in the middle of the corn fields of Nebraska, catching rivers in paper
cups, scribbling on stones with abandon in the amber waves of grace where
God-sized dreams unfold.

Monday, April 15, 2013

I never really learned the real cooking basics and the
perfectionist within me has a little anxiety attack every time I read words
like braise or soufflé and I picture myself running out of my house covered in
flames, waving a Teflon frying pan, taking a swig of the lone bottle of cooking
wine I was able to save heroically while the rest of my life goes down in smoky
flames.

Dramatic, I know, but I’m lucky enough to be married to a
man who makes my eyes roll back in my head in pure ecstasy on a nightly basis, and
I don’t only mean in the bedroom.

Ahem.

Me? Cook? Uhhhh….why?

Mr. Smitten cooks like it’s his purpose in life and I eat
like it’s mine, and me and Jack Spratt have existed just fine this way for many
years thankyouverymuch. Still, there is something about the act of nourishing
the people I love, about the magic of sizzling onions and melting gouda that I
admire with the kind of jealous longing I usually reserve only for bestselling
authors and mothers with green thumbs who actually look good in skinny jeans
and never yell at their children.

When I had the opportunity to review Shauna Niequist’s Bread & Wine, I didn’t pause for a
second, even though I knew the book was primarily one that was going to involve
recipes which included ingredients I had never heard of. Shauna is one of my very
favorite writers and I would probably buy her grocery list if it was for sale.
(If you haven’t yet read Bittersweet
or Cold Tangerines, it sucks to be
you. Get thee to a bookseller, STAT. Thank me later.)

Bread & Wine arrived
in the mail, the cover all wistful and beautiful, and it sat on my kitchen
counter for weeks. I swallowed the lump in my throat every time I walked past
it, afraid to jump inside, afraid that Shauna’s awesomeness would inspire me to
soufflé something…and we can all guess how that might turn out.

Eventually, though, I opened it…took in the words with
trepidation. And in the way she does so gracefully and beautifully, Shauna
brought me to tears and laughter with her narrative, her heart all over the
pages, stories splashed with wine and the smell of Grand Rapids, Michigan,
shimmery with love and grace and carefully crafted words.

She invited me into the kitchen again, inspired me to care
more deeply about what I put in my body, encouraged me to laugh and love and
drink and dine and weep with the people I love, because that’s what the table
is about…communion with life, communion with God, communion with mystery and
grace, pain and loss.

Suddenly, I was baking something called Gaia cookies utterly
fearless of charbroiling the bottoms like I always do in my ancient, finicky oven
(which I think might be made of aluminum foil and paper clips, but I digress).
Picture me in the Dollhouse kitchen, chopping dates and wielding a pastry
blender like I knew what I was doing, and at Safeway buying goat cheese and
almond milk like a completely different woman than the one who came through the
grocery line last week with three bags of Cheetos and store-brand baloney.

Of all the mouth-watering recipes Shauna includes in the
text, I started with cookies because she calls them breakfast cookies and well, let’s face it, any reason to justify chocolate
for breakfast is a good one in my book. The process was simple, even if I was
tempted to forget the whole baking bit and just eat the batter by the fistful. Oh
Mylanta, were they good. Soft, chewy, and ten times more satisfying than the
mushy banana remnants I generally pick off Caleb’s plate and call breakfast. I
didn’t even burn the bottoms, which was surely a sheer act of Divine
intervention.

Do yourself a favor and buy a copy of Bread & Wine, then sit down and read it all in one sitting like
I did because you just can’t bear to put it down and if you stop mid-chapter,
you might put an entire French silk pie inside your own face in the span of a
minute.

Buy it for the recipes. Buy it for the soul-squeezing
stories Shauna tells. Buy it so you can have cookies for breakfast like me. (They
have granola in them. You’re golden.)

Once again, Shauna, you rocked my world, nourished my
spirit, and you’re totally to blame for the cookie crumbs in my keyboard. What
an honor it has been to sit at your table, even virtually, to chop walnuts
under your inspiration, and to taste the beauty of life at its ripest. <3 p="">

Saturday, March 16, 2013

You can get your ketchup bottles made custom these days. Did
you know? Anyone with a couple extra bucks can just have their own name designed
right into the label on a Heinz ketchup bottle. This is a thing. Because we
deserve it, right? Don’t we hard-working North Americans deserve to have our ketchup personalized?

I read this morning about a new beauty technique that
involves a $2,000 procedure for removing blood from your body and injecting it
into your face. Apparently, it’s a rage with the Kardashians and, no doubt,
young women everywhere will follow suit since it allegedly makes you look
younger. Hide your age. Save your pennies.

At the superstore this morning, I picked up an assortment of
color-coded insulated faux-mason jar drinking glasses for my kids. At $5 a
piece, they weren’t exactly an extravagant splurge but I find myself wondering
if there was a better universal use for that $20. Could it have bought a meal
for someone? Diapers for a struggling single parent? Added to the funds from
other unnecessary purchases to contribute to bringing clean drinking water or medical
help to the masses of people on this planet dying daily from contaminated water
and malnutrition-related illness?

Yes. Of course it could have. But I liked those cups and the
money was mine and no matter what I do in this life, I will probably always
have a warm-enough home with a cupboard full of more drinking glasses than
people to drink from them. What’s wrong with that?

I glance around and my heart calculates the sum total of all
the excess I can see from where I’m sitting. A man rides by on an $800 bike,
passed by a $30,000 car. I take a swig from my $4 bottle of vitamin-infused fancy
juice in its plastic bottle and make notes with my $3 pen in the university library
my $10,000 a year tuition helps fund. If it rains, I will open my $22 umbrella
and try not to get my $18 flats wet, which would be a real tragedy since I only
have about sixteen pairs of shoes in my closet.

Somewhere it all gets dizzying and I become nauseated.

It’s easy to think that what I have or don't have, what I do
or don’t do doesn’t matter that much. But it matters.

It matters because the sad truth is that there are more than
enough resources to go around in this world. More than enough dollars and
farmland to feed the hungry. More than enough words for everyone to be
encouraged and more than enough of us calling ourselves disciples to overcome
the poverty of love that exists all around us. We hoard the manna and it spoils
in our homes, in our bellies, in our pantries and bank accounts and vacation
homes. We are afflicted by the disease that comes from overabundance but to
cure it, we hoard some more and thank Him for His blessing.

It overwhelms me, the abundance of God’s manna and the way
it can still feel daily like we never have enough to go around. I never know
how much is too much, whether giving up air conditioning matters while my
family still pays $200 a month for cell phone access, and if having a hundred
bucks in the bank is responsible stewardship or if it’s hoarding riches so I
avoid the question altogether and buy a Blu-Ray player because, well c’mon, we need one, right?

As my heart cries for ministry again, I try to imagine how
it is we justify this lifestyle when we’ve all been told to abandon it. Yes, Jesus, we whisper in our
stone-walled churches with the patterned carpet and the cappuccino ministry. I give it all to you.

There are days I think seven articles of clothing ought to
be enough to live on, that a room with a bed and a loaf of bread is all I
should strive to keep ahold of in this life. There are days I think, “sell all
you have and give it to the poor” actually means sell all you have and give it to the poor and isn’t just a metaphor
for discipleship, that “go into all the world and make disciples of all nations”
isn’t an invitation for a posh holy land tour but a command to get our knees
bloody, to fill our mouths with the taste of the poverty which can only be quenched
by mercy.

I went back to college so I could someday teach at a university
and have a retirement account and health benefits but lately, its feeling an
awful lot like the pursuit of comfort above all things and I’m pretty confident
that the kind of comfort I need is not the kind that gathers zeroes in an IRA. I’m
not sure if “get wisdom” means the kind I can memorize out of textbooks or the
kind that can only be learned in the hard doing of following His footsteps.

The truth is, I’d like to balance the life I want, the life
I secretly believe somewhere deep down that I deserve with the commands of giving and serving. I’d like to do
what makes me happy and believe that things like sex trafficking and gendercide
are God’s business, that there’s nothing I can do about them but maybe cut a
check every once in a while because God has been good to me. But I feel myself
believing the lie… it’s okay to be comfortable while other people suffer. It’s
okay to worship in fancy churches and learn at fancy schools and talk about how
people suffer while I wrinkle my forehead and purse my lips because how sad. It's okay to buy a latte and
another new candle and do the kind of work that people do when they’re pursuing
their own comfort because that's what this country is all about. That's what this
life is all about.

I’ve believed the lie that my happiness, my comfort, is more
important than obedience. I’ve believed that I can have a foot in both worlds—that
I can sponsor a child or two and hand the homeless guy a burrito and I’ve done
my duty. But I hold my wallet close. My children and my cell phone and my
apartment with a thermostat that works, because I don’t really want to give it
all to Jesus. I don’t really want to lay down and die, even if that’s precisely
what I signed up for when I asked Him to make me His.

The honest truth is that I know all of it. I know it and I
believe I’m off track. I make small changes and buy fair trade coffee and
sponsor a kid and think I’m doing something good in the world but all the while
I’m smothered by the abundance we’re all neck deep in around here. I don’t know
how to live in this world but not be of it.

I don’t know but I’m willing to learn and I’m going to
continue asking for brokenness until I abandon the idea that I can balance the
American dream with the commands of Christ, because I suspect that there really
is no balance. There are only personalized ketchup bottles and luxury cars and
children in Africa being suffocated by their own tumors for lack of medical
care. There are only cheeseburgers and sale racks and girl babies buried alive
because they should have been born as males. There are only plastic bottles
filled with designer water that I can swig and gulp from all I want but not
without the image of the thousands dying every day without clean water access,
of the bottles that linger in the earth longer than the bones of the babies who
died without it.

And I pray the prayer I’ve been afraid to pray all along.
The prayer that I would mean it. The prayer that trades work for water bottles
and just enough for far too much.

Thursday, January 24, 2013

I measure the grounds, three heaping scoopfuls because I
drink my coffee like gasoline, and I get the mug ready. It looks more like a
soup bowl than a coffee cup but there is much to be done today, pages-long
lists of writing deadlines, emails to send, assignments to complete, calls to
make.

It starts to feel like something big, some days.

Writing a book or two, going to college, giving speeches and
having a blog and writing deadlines and things filling up a calendar. It’s a
dream come true, after all.

I ponder the bigness of it a minute, feeling all of my 33
years for a change, like my words are taken seriously, like my foolish prose might amount to something that buds from my heart someday, something worth
these eye-strained hours but just the sheer love of it.

So I pour it dark and sweet and breathe it in, and think
much of me with my bowl full of coffee and my little words today. I am glad I
have persisted with my tiny big thoughts, glad I have kept click-clacking the
keys with contemplation and questions, challenges to those with
bigger brains and bigger titles than me.

I think, today, I will have my coffee hot and strong and I
will nibble the end of my glasses while I think. I will drink from my bowl over
an email to my publisher and feel right distinguished with myself, for a moment.

But the thought is fleeting.

Five plump fingers rest upon the
flesh of my back thigh, just beneath the pink ruffled robe he likes to be
wrapped up inside. I did not hear him coming.

He rubs his eyes and drags his gray blanket across the
floor, across dinner crumbs and the shabby teal rug that was new only weeks ago
but already looks destined for the garbage. Twelve trampling feet will do that
to a carpet.

They will do it to a mother too, from time to time.

And even though I feel it now, the strain of this body
premature for my years, it stings and groans for the hours I have not sat, the
years I have not rested.

Bowl-mug in hand, we head to the couch and his head finds my
belly, pushing gently into the body gone soft under the laps of three babies, tempered
by the gnawing worry over all those not-born babies too, the one whose face I
never got to see or kiss and all the ones who wore size 11 Nikes and called me
mom just for a season. I am trampled shaggy and soft, body and heart, by those
pink baby feet and those smelly boy feet, and those patent-leather-heeled feet. I have gone shaggier than the teal rug in my kitchen.

It starts to feel like something big, some days.

Like all the mothering and loving and gnawing with worry amounts
to more than all the words I could collect in a lifetime.

No title is bigger than mother, I think. None which I
am after, anyhow.

So I settle into stale sleep breath and blonde bedhead and
savor coffee and feel rightly distinguished, here, in this.

Not for words, not for notice, not for anything but the
elevated place of being the carpet below these precious toes, of a down-pillow
belly holding up this sweaty head with its drooping blonde Mohawk.

I feared for the life of my boys last
night inside a fast food joint where an agitated, mentally unstable
man paced the floor and rallied angry, held his fist in his pocket
grasping what might have been a weapon...and everything I thought I
believed about nonresistance challenged me the instant my faith came
up against my fear.

Our french fries sat steaming but
untouched. We were, in a sense, held hostage. The man's writhing
angry body draped across the dirty floor, blocking that swinging door
with its golden arches cursing and forbidding any of us to leave, his
guttural groans bouncing off walls and tables. My heart beat for the
Lord's touch of grace upon this man, for God's will in this scary thing,
but when the man pointed and laughed maniacally directly at me,
singling me out with a terrifying glare, first I wished my
husband was there—a military-trained expert marksman—with
the concealed weapon he used to carry. With careful hands I texted
Ryan, telling him I loved him and that I was scared, and avoided the
foreboding words I wanted to say:

If I shouldn't come home, take care
of our babies. Make sure they know I love them.

“I want you to get a pistol
again...soon,” I texted instead, knowing the words would surprise
and sober him as much as they did me. I was afraid for our lives, and
I wished both for peace and for pistol. He has rallied for having one again,
a pistol I know he would never use to harm unless an innocent
person's life was at stake.
Unless.

It breaks my heart all the same.

We are none of us innocent people.

I do not like guns in general and I do
not believe they are the answer to an epidemic of hate and hurt. I don't honestly know how you can turn the other cheek toward Jesus, toward peace, with a pistol in your pocket. I
grieve today that my heart reached for violence in the gripping midst of last night's fear, that it leapt for safety and not first for salvation.

This is
not about politics; it is about peace. Peace that transcends all
understanding.

So I muddied the waters of what once
was crystal clear because when the fire got hot, I valued my life and
the lives of my family more than I trusted in the name of Jesus. I
trusted the assurance of my husband's expertise, trusted that a
bullet in a crazy man's thigh might really save our lives...every one of
them already saved.

Yesterday, I saw humanity at its
bleakest, a gray haze over the world I'm tempted to call home.

But it isn't.

It isn't home, this earthen-house, so
broken and blood-soaked. It's so tempting to forget its temporal nature
when the days run long and the body aches hard and I forget the joys
of this life are only notes in an orchestra of heavenly preview. I
forget that I am in this broken world only on official business...my
passport stamped with redeeming blood, my permanent address given at
Calvary.

In fear, I forget.

The police took twenty minutes to
arrive, minutes I spent texting my husband, praying beggy prayers of
safety and desperation, eyeing the crazy man's pocket and planning
our escape at the first glint of gunmetal. By the time the lone
officer pulled slowly into the restaurant, armed and heroic, the
crazy man had been swallowed by night. Only then did I pray for this man's healing, for his safety, for his soul if it needs it, and his hurt
and his life worth much as mine.

He was gone and life went on. No fanfare. No media. The police took interviews. The fry machine sizzled and sparked into business as usual. Hamburgers were chewed by teeth still fear-chattering while we strangers all looked around at each other's goosebumps and stunned faces and wondered what we were supposed to do now, our frail makeshift family, united in an instant over terror and iced tea.

The boys and I got to the car and headed back
southward, silent and shaken on the highway. The scene recurred through my conscious on a loop, restarting every mile until my husband's call broke through. He announced that the two kids at home needed an immediate treatment
for head lice, which we later learn were passed on by my daughter's cherub-faced friend, curls always adorably tangled, whose home is filled with filth and animal feces but is starkly empty of a mother. Hers is just another kind of broken
home, I know, reminiscent of this earth which stinks and crawls with
the infestation of destruction. I groaned with the inconvenient
timing of this minor plague, so desperately needing something of
beauty to redeem.

I stopped at a store and scanned grocery shelves for the
three-step RID kit in the white box, the one that makes me nauseous to purchase, but a woman, worn with wrinkles and raspy cigarette-stale breath, began yelling at her husband and the pharmacist behind the counter beside me.

“CANCER?! When did I have cancer? I DIDN'T have cancer, you
lying sack of shit! I'm perfectly healthy! I'm FINE, damn it! I WILL
NOT DIE!” She thrashed tearful at her husband's shirtsleeves; misty-eyed man hushing
and pulling her close, the woman swinging and spitting on them both.

So much hurt, here. So much darkness.

Have mercy.

Forty seconds later, a different woman
passed by, crying into a cell phone that her husband had started
making meth again, that she didn't want to live anymore, and the
whole black night reeked hard and heavy of Hell on Earth. I wanted to give up my citizenship right then and there in the Beauty department, to cash in the earthly heartbeat I'd
been so scared to lose hours earlier just to make the madness stop.

I tried to muster hope, to bring a holy
thought to mind that could bring me back from this nightmare, but I could land on nothing but the question of where gunmetal fits into grace.

...where gunmetal fits into grace.

Recoiling again at the darkness that flooded
these desperate lives, I feared despite truth that evil could triumph
on a night like this, and I wept.

Just a few blocks from home the radio sang
loud, “Though darkness fills the night, it cannot hide the light.
Whom shall I fear?” but the song ended before the darkness did, so
the music faded into a radio interview. A meek and whisper-thin voice
gathered strength in narrating her own horrific survival story
through the car speakers, and our scathed spirits sat seatbelted
stiff in our bodies, wincing at the endless grief of the night.

“I love Jesus,” the woman declared
in shaky whispers, “because I know He forgives me for being a
battered woman.”

The airwaves went silent; the
interviewer, wordless.

Did you catch that?

She
loves the Lord who forgives her for being
battered...beaten and stabbed by a man whose heroin addiction split her lips and broke her legs, whose violence killed their unborn child. Forgiven. For being battered.

After hearing the story, I only know what I don't know at all.

I don't know what forgiveness even is for a
God like that, for a person like me. I don't know what it looks like
to act justly and to love mercy anymore, when evil breathes near
enough to tickle my neck hair.

I don't know what faith looks like so
full there is no fear. I don't know how to long for the heart of
Jesus more than I do, how to gather trust up around my neck and
settle into its warmth and assurance when it's all I can do but to
whisper, "My God," at the madness. "Have mercy."

I don't know how to pray or what to
pray for when the world seems eclipsed with suffering. I only know
that no bullet can take me. No bullet will save me because a nail
already has.

What I know—all I I know—is that
there is no genesis in wickedness. Evil cannot create. It can only
destroy. Darkness disintegrates and deteriorates the sound of that
angel orchestra, the familiar melody of home still faint in the
weariness of my heart.

Demolition does not stop demolition. In
response to creation, we create. In response to destruction, we
create even more. We can cover gray haze with orange paint, redeem
hopelessness with the redemption and beauty of words made gospel, songs
and movement and laughter and wonder that shines pinholes of
grace-light through cloaks of fear, singing the joy-song of home.

In creation alone, I stop wishing for safety
and start seeking my Savior. I call Him in with words in graphite,
words of sacrifice, of love, of the home my heart sings for. Evil
destroys but holy creates. Holy redeems and holy survives. Holy glimmers bright with glory, brighter
than bullets and gunmetal, brighter than anger, brighter than fear.

Me

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When you are describing,A shape, or sound, or tint;Don't state the matter plainly,But put it in a hint;And learn to look at all things,With a sort of mental squint.~Lewis Carroll

Often people attempt to live their lives backwards; they try to have more things, or more money, in order to do more of what they want, so they will be happier. The way it actually works is the reverse. You must first be who you really are, then do what you need to do, in order to have what you want. ~Margaret Young

To think creatively, we must be able to look afresh at what we normally take for granted. ~George Kneller

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